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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

It's very hard; DARPA likes to fund hard things[1] :-).

This isn't, however, DARPA's first foray into automatic program translation, or even automatic translation into Rust[2].

[1]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=DARPA%20hard

[2]: https://c2rust.com/

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DARPA is basically a state-sponsored VC that optimizes for completely different things. Instead of looking for 100x financial returns, they want technical advantages for the United States. The "moat" is the hardness of developing and operationalizing those technologies first.

DARPA's commercialization track record is decidedly mixed, so the VC comparison is unexpectedly apt :-)

(But yes: DARPA's mandate is explicitly to discover and develop the next generation of emerging technologies for military use.)

Decades ago, as my father explained to me, ARPA (no "D" at that time) was happy if 1% of their projects went all the way through to successful deployment. If they had a higher success rate it would mean they weren't aiming high enough.

> DARPA's commercialization track record is decidedly mixed...

If you count my number of attempts, sure.

If you count by impact, it's hard to come up with many things more impactful than the Internet...?

Yeah, I meant by number. But also: ARPA didn't commercialize the Internet! They explicitly refused to commercialize it; commercialization only happened after an Act of Congress induced interconnections between NSFNET and commercial networks.

To be pedantic, In-q-tel is the literal state-sponsored VC.

DARPA is a step closer to traditional research labs but there is obviously some overlap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

> DARPA is a step closer to traditional research labs but there is obviously some overlap.

It's more like the NSF but focused on commercial grantees with project management thrown on top to orchestrate everything.

The really unique part is how much independence each program manager has and the term limits that prevent empire building.

in this case it seems to me the hard task that DARPA has chosen is to get me to forget how much they spent on pushing Ada.

I can't find any clear references to DARPA (or ARPA) being involved in Ada's development. It was a DoD program but, well, the DoD is notoriously large and multi-headed.

(But even if DARPA was involved in Ada: I think it's clear, at this point, that Ada has been a resounding success in a small number of domains without successfully breaking into general-purpose adoption. I don't have a particular value judgment associated with that, but from a strategic perspective it makes a lot of sense for DARPA to focus program analysis research on popular general-purpose languages -- there's just more labor and talent available.)

Too lazy to look it up, but I'm pretty sure DARPA was involved and certain that DoD contracta prioritized ADA for a long time.

Too bored to pass up a challenge to refute somebody who is too lazy to look it up.

I looked it up. DARPA was not involved.

in this case it seems to me the hard task that DARPA has chosen is to get me to forget how much they spent on pushing Ada.

You hate jumbo jets, high-speed trains, air traffic control, and satellites?

Do you know what fear is? Getting in an airplane where the flight controls use NPM.

   npm ERR! install Couldn't read dependencies
   npm ERR! package.json ENOENT, open '/boeing/787-9/flaps-up.json'
   npm ERR! package.json This is most likely not a problem with npm itself.
   npm ERR! package.json npm can't find a package.json file in your current directory.

I have enough fears about features in the entertainment system, and that performance options are accessed through that same touch screen UX.

ada does not require 'pushing'.

once the maturity of the users advances to a sufficient point, then ada is the only solution.

"ada. used in creating reliable software since 1983"

when i first saw ada, i didn't understand the why. now i understand the why, but ada is effectively gone.

-- old fortran / C / Assembly programmer

Ada is still around, at a big enough level to keep 7 commercial vendors selling compilers.

Something unheard of, paying for software tools in 2024, who would imagine that.

it was depressing when RH dropped ada support. sure, it was gcc, but it was so nice to have an ada compiler part of the default gcc installation.

gnat needs money. well deserved. but adoption needs a free, easy to install compiler.

5 years ago i had the pleasure of resurrecting a dead system. it was about 30k of ada, lets call it ada 87 (!). unknown compiler, 32 bit, 68K processor, 16 MB memory, unknown OS.

code was compiling in 2 days, running in 2 weeks. i needed to change from using 32 bit floats to 64 bit floats (seems positional data is a little more accurate in 2020). 1 declaration in 1 package spec and a recompile, and all my positions are good.

i love that language!

Very cool project! Were you able to build a working 68K GNAT cross-compiler yourself, or did you purchase one from one of the major Ada vendors?

target was x86_64 / linux. just updated the rpm spec file for the gcc build to enable ada. rebuild and install.

so, changed wordsize, processor, operating system... minimal source code impact.

Oh, it's around, but laypeople never see those codebases.

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